exogeny

I suppose I just disagree that someone from a less affluent or privileged than me with got a 1400 SAT is less qualified than me (1510) simply because one number is larger than the other. These numbers don't exist in a vacuum.

Alright, I’m going to try to weigh in on this subject in good faith. Wish me luck!

I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and attended a very good public school. I had friends who lived only ten or fifteen minutes away but attended schools that were substantially worse by nearly every measurable standard. How should a university compare our applications on an apples-to-apples basis?

Some people would say, “Just use standardized test scores.” And sure, those can be part of the equation. But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education. The list goes on. How exactly should those advantages be measured? Is it a university’s job to account for them?

Others may disagree, but if I were on a university admissions team, I would say that it is...at least to some extent. I wouldn’t want a completely homogeneous student body. I would want every admitted student to clear a reasonable academic floor, but beyond that, I would value diversity in backgrounds, opinions, interests, intended majors, and life experiences.

In my opinion, the issue is much more complicated than people often make it out to be, and I don’t personally believe there is some vast liberal boogeyman behind it. I don’t think the process is perfectly fair to everyone, nor do I think perfect fairness is possible in the first place. But I also don’t automatically agree that it is wrong for universities to try -- however imperfectly or ham-fistedly they might do it -- to understand the broader context in which an application was submitted.

Polymarket is based in NYC, in Soho, on Crosby Street. Knock yourself out if you want to go find anyone there.

I have a lot of deep ambivalence here. On one hand, I would rather Americans be safe. I don't want anyone in harm's way; if I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather we have superiority.

On the other hand, the "the ends justifies the means" justification of the near constant erosion of civil liberties and due process is really, really concerning. And I do not trust, at all, the Rand-lite tech bro sociopaths or anyone in the Trump administration to do the right thing.

Do you think there is an acceptable third option between "the globalists winning" and "it is OK for a single media outlet to wage a war on the grieving parents of the victims of a mass murder"?

I agree with this, but it's also true that Tesler was a difficult, argumentative blocker and dinosaur at Yahoo! in the mid-2000s. The upper management there blew such massive opportunities, over and over and over again.

Simple, functional design. Obviously not...quite the intended use of the HTML table elements, but ah well, that era was fun. Tables and image maps and transparent GIFs!

People are INSANELY sleeping on Hypercard.

It was Andreas Ess for me. PlaneJump.

That opened my eyes to the world of Assembly, which in turn turned me on to the demoscene, and off I went into a truly magical subculture!

There was a great Money Stuff blurb about that w/r/t Adam Neumann. I can't find it to quote it directly, but the gist was that if you disabuse yourself of the notion that Neumann was playing a game of entrepreneurship and good-faith empire building, and instead conclude that the game he was playing was shameless capital extraction, every step and action he took suddenly makes sense.

The truly amazing thing, especially the second time around, are the supposedly sophisticated investors who fall for it. "Oh, he's learned his lesson -- he won't do it again!".

Pathetic. Everyone in this story is pathetic. Trump, Milton, all of them.

Yeah, two easy fixes here: don't make the sidebar jump back to the top after loading a message, and sort by date. Otherwise I appreciate the view into this heartless sociopath's mind.

There’s two different things to argue here.

First, yes, you’re right.

Second, they raised a shit ton of money under the bull case of mass consumer adoption, which is going to be impossible if that said consumer feels it is rigged.

Let’s all be real here; for 95% of their use cases both now and in the future, they’re a sportsbook. Which is fine! But they’re not going to get to anywhere near returning a multiple on their manic valuation until they act like one. And the first thing to do is to stop with all of the pseudo-academic bullshit about what a prediction market is. And the second is for them to hire someone, anyone, who knows even the first thing about sports because everyone even tangentially connected to this market knows that before six months ago, Tarek and Shayne couldn’t differentiate between a football and a buttplug.

Interesting that this author was out ahead of this theme a full twelve years ago. Kudos.

It's not all that complex though, really. Just a bunch of adult children who were bullied mercilessly and now have convinced themselves, through the magic of Dunning-Kruger, that they are both eminently more suitable to run things and eminently justified in using that power to exact revenge on their (largely imagined) tormentors.

Coming soon: What LinkedIn being down taught me about SaaS sales.

You're right. I guess that means we should deny them any due process, target them (and anyone who looks like them, even vaguely) indiscriminately, and murder anyone who deigns to get in our way.

There's a lot of really interesting stories about the Eastern Bloc defections into the NHL in the late 1980s. IIRC, Alexander Mogilny, who was the best prospect in the world at the time, hid in a suitcase and defected during the World Junior Championships -- talk about bravery!

Once Mogilny defected, it was impossible for the system to hold. Mogilny (along with Pavel Bure and Fedorov) were groomed and training together to be the next great line combination in hockey; two years later, all three were in the NHL.

They won't collapse, but they won't reach their full potential. I would hate to be a16z sitting on their $10B post-money valuation Kalshi bags, that's for sure.

Insider trading is a feature, not a bug, say Shayne and Tarek, stupidly.

You can't have this amount of obvious manipulation and expect the average retail consumer to join. Same reason why there hasn't been mass consumer adoption of crypto. People just don't feel safe.

The short, uncouth but Occam’s Razor answer is because Putin has a micropenis and/or his parents were incredibly abusive towards him.

Oh man. Yeah, Sega Channel was amazing. It's true that it came pretty late in the Genesis' life and by that time, Sega was prioritizing Saturn but man, I loved SC and looked forward to the first of the month when all of the menus would switch.

Ross Douthat makes me (figuratively) vomit every time I read his nonsensical garbage.

RCT2 is my favorite game of all-time, bar none. It is an absolute joy to play (via OpenRCT2, it should be said) all of these years later.

It's a masterpiece and Chris Sawyer is a genius.

At a certain threshold of wealth, you stop having anyone around you that will tell you anything other than platitudes about how great and wonderful you are. If he ever had any self-awareness or humility -- and that is questionable -- it's been Dunning Krugered and yes-manned into absolute shreds.

He's a weak, frail manchild masquerading as a cartoonish supervillain. Fuck him.

Like anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities.

The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.

It's extremely telling that as Thiel is talking about Zuck's speech at Harvard, he is using the pronoun "we", as if Thiel was also giving the speech.

Zuck is Thiel's mouthpiece, through and through. And it explains everything about Meta.

That is completely wrong. Who is the other peer in your transaction on Polymarket or Kalshi?

Susquehanna. Jane Street. Two Sigma.

It's not some rando two towns over. The PMs get paid to front run access to these market makers, who crush the retail bettor, er, predictor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43758527

You literally say it yourself!

Christ, man. Stop digging. You fucked up, stop moderating, and move on.

Your comment made me really, really sad. Please tell your friend that there is someone out there, someone random, someone who will never meet them, who appreciates them and the work they've done over their career.

All? No.

A lot? Yes.